Jira vs GitLab

GitLab compared to other DevOps tools

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Summary

Jira Software is an issue tracker and agile project management application. Portfolio for Jira Portfolio is a separate add-on that enables portoflio management in Jira Software. Jira Service Desk is a separate application to enable IT and customer service capablilities. Jira Core is a scaled down version of Jira Software that contains the general project managment capabilities without the software and agile-specific functionality of Jira Software.

Jira is available via 3 deploment models:

Cloud: SaaS version of Jira hosted and managed by Atlassian

Server: self-managed version that can be deployed on a single server

Data Center: self-managed version that can be deployed to multiple servers for high availability.

Weaknesses

Extending the native functionality of Jira is done through plugins. Plugins are expensive to maintain, secure, and upgrade. In contrast, GitLab is open core and anyone can contribute changes directly to the codebase, which once merged would be automatically tested and maintained with every change.

Comments/Anecdotes

Probably some of these features could be worked around in GitLab (e.g. by using labels exclusively). In particular for our organization we have been using Jira for much longer than GitLab. Migrating to another issue tracking system for existing project would be less than trivial, i.e. if one wants to maintain the history.

Agreed that the problem isn't directly Jira, but (anecdotally maybe) there seems a clear correlation between Jira and unhappy developers who feel their tracker has way too much process. Jira doesn't cause the root problem, but Atlassian are profiting from it existing, and so maybe people are encouraged to use it in those ways. I'm not letting it off the hook so easily.

JIRA makes it dangerously easy to implement overly bureaucratic processes. A certain kind of organization is drawn to it for that reason. Even a healthy organization switching to JIRA can get carried away with the tools now at its disposal.

Resources

Integrations

GitLab has Jira integration that allows Jira Software to be used as an issue tracker for the planning stage while using GitLab for the rest of the DevOps lifecycle: source code managment, CI/CD, and monitoring.

You can move issues between projects in GitLab. All links, history and comments will be copied and the original issue will reference the newly moved issue. This makes working with multiple issue trackers much easier.

Large companies often have hundreds of different projects, all with different moving parts at the same time. GitLab Enterprise Edition allows for multiple Issue Boards for a single project so you can to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. Multiple Issue Boards are particularly useful for large projects with more than one team or in situations where a repository is used to host the code of multiple products.

An Issue Board is based on its project's label structure, therefore, it applies the same descriptive labels to indicate placement on the board. GitLab issues can appear on multiple issues and they still have meaning without the context of a particular board.

Issue boards/dashboards reflect an organizations flow for processing work items. These boards can reflect individualized workflow or follow established patterns. Issue board types with established patterns (such as Scrum and Kanban) can make setup of new boards easier.

Teams have access to more than a dozen out-of-the-box reports with real-time, actionable insights into how their team is performing sprint over sprint. Example reports are sprint burndown, epic burndown, cumulative flow diagram, velocity chart, burn up chart, and sprint report.